


On queer friendship, fandom, and negative capability

by breathedout



Series: Meta Essays [2]
Category: Multi-Fandom
Genre: Archived From Tumblr, Archived from havingbeenbreathedout blog, Meta Essay, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 12:13:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16832404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathedout/pseuds/breathedout
Summary: Essay on the difficulties of queer representation: the ways in which the understandable push for clear-cut, textual queer representation sometimes reinforces a bright line between "sex/romance" and "something else," and invisibilizes more liminal relationships that more accurately reflect my own queer experience. (Addendum clarifies why the original post was written through a queer lens when simplifying that boundary hurts straight people too.)Originally posted to Tumblr on March 12, 2016. Addendum originally posted to Tumblr on March 15, 2016.





	1. Original post

**Author's Note:**

> I'm backing up my fannish essays from Tumblr so as not to lose them if/when the censorship of adult content comes for my blog. Apologies to those getting spammed with years-old meta.

For a long time now, I’ve been feeling increasingly alienated by a lot of the ways in which (the shipping side of) fandom, relationship categories, and the push for queer visibility intersect. I haven’t known how to talk about it, because it seems like whichever way I turn I’m likely to step on toes; also it intersects with my own life in ways that are pretty personal. But my compulsion to get it down in words isn’t decreasing, so here goes.

The narrative tension between “sexually/romantically involved” and “something else” is the fuel that powers the shipping side of fandom. And while “something else,” in this context, can sometimes be enmity or competition or a professional relationship, a significant percentage of the time it’s close friendship, or one of the above in combination with close friendship. Inherent in the construction “sex/romance versus something else” is a bright line distinguishing one from the other: a dichotomy analogous, in ways, to male-typical Christian conversion narratives from Augustine on: I (we) was (were) something inferior (friends, heathens); then there was an event (a kiss backed with swelling music; a welcoming of Christianity into one’s heart), and I/we transmogrified into something **fundamentally different** —something more intense, something more meaningful, something intrinsically better and, more basically, something **qualitatively distinct**. Since close friendship is often the “something else” positioned on the starting side of a pair’s personal secular conversion narrative, it gets trivialized, shunted aside, cast as a pale imitation of the requited sex-romance bundle to come. This is disparaging to those incredibly precious and unique relationships that exist squarely in friend territory and also, incidentally, pretty simplistic in terms of equating sex with romance—all of which is bad enough. **But more and more I feel incredibly alienated by the entire bright-line friend-versus-sex/romance construction at all, and everything it implies about the clarity and impermeability of boundaries between those categories.** Like Teresa of Avila (likely the only time I will ever compare myself to her) I object to the presentation of a one-way conversion narrative. And I object to the idea of a substantive, alchemical transformation between sinner/friend and saint/lover. 

Of course, discourse around this stuff gets even more complicated when queerness enters the picture, because our cultural master narrative has a long history of using close same-sex friendship as a blind to deny queer sexual desire and romance. 

This happens all the time, both in studies of historical figures (too many to name, but the naysaying furore in the 1990s over the possibility that Greta Garbo may have had female lover(s) is one I happen to have been reading about recently, as is the perennial debate over the significance of expressions of same-sex affection in 19th century letters) and in the creation and consumption of fiction. I am thinking here both of the queer-baiting tactics of TV shows that pander to a queer demographic with one hand while laughing off their gay jokes on the other with a “They’re such good friends they might as well be gay”; and also of straightwashed adaptations of narratives that were originally explicitly queer, like the film version of Fannie Flagg’s novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, which overwrites lesbianism with close hetero female friendship. 

This phenomenon is obviously infuriating and traumatic for us modern-day queers! I share the common frustration that leads to things like the now-ubiquitous “gal pal meme,” which plays on the [Daily Mail’s reportage of Kristen Stewart and Alicia Cargile](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-3046645/Inseparable-Kristen-Stewart-enjoys-Coachella-live-gal-pal-Alicia-Cargile-three-days-25th-birthday.html); or posts about how, for example, what Sherlock Holmes feels for John Watson must be romantic love and not mere friendship because “[Friends don’t fall apart from grief when their friend gets married](http://homosociallyyours.tumblr.com/post/84242335779/anigrrrl2-skulls-and-tea-friendly-reminder)” (not picking on the person whose reblog I linked to; half my dash reblogged that post at some point and homosociallyyours is great, a+ would follow again—also this is JUST AN EXAMPLE of a larger pattern; for the love of baby koalas I am begging you please don’t make this post primarily about the specifics of the show in question). There’s a very valid sense of, my god: what does it take before a same-sex romance becomes visible? What does it take before same-sex sexual desire—especially sexual desire between women—is taken seriously? As a woman who has many times been interrupted while dancing and/or making out with other women in clubs and at lesbian dance nights to field inquiries like “Aw, are you sisters?” and “Are you here with anybody?” and “I’m going to claim you by writing on your skin with Sharpie” (yes really); and as a person whose prior romantic/sexual partners have often felt more sexually threatened by my male friends than by my female ones even though they theoretically knew that I was almost exclusively sexually attracted to women: believe me, I get this. I love fucking women and I don’t particularly like fucking men, and I’m mystified as to why this is so difficult to see or understand. So I get the anger and the eye-rolling reactions when yet another relationship that looks very obviously like a queer sexual-romantic pairing gets soft-pedaled as a friendship because friendship is less threatening to the mainstream. 

At the same time, though, those reactions—reactions that push hard towards the visibility of the queer sex/romance juggernaut specifically at the expense of friendship—rub up against my actual (queer!) lived experience in a way that I find deeply alienating and even… even grief-inducing. I’ve been trying to pick apart the whys of that, because there are a lot of different threads to it. But I think at the core of the issue are two assumptions, both of which run absolutely contrary to my lived reality:

  1. Romantic/sexual relationships are fundamentally more central and more important than friend relationships; and even more:
  2. **Romance/sex is fundamentally and qualitatively distinct from friendship, and doesn’t occur within it or overlap with it.**



  
So: I have been in culturally normative monogamous romantic relationships in the past, and they had their pluses and minuses, but at this point in my life I basically—I have friends. Some of my friends I fuck, or have fucked; some I don’t, or haven’t. Some of my friends I deeply and devotedly love; some I like with a tremendous warmth of fondness; some are great for having a light-hearted coffee break and then going our separate ways; some I have known for thirty years; some I don’t know that well yet but look forward to getting to know better; some I crave like candy (is this “romance”? does that matter?); some I yearn after with the abysses that open up inside me (is this romance? is that the most interesting question?); some I get excited about going on long vacations with; some I like for short bursts but can’t spend long periods with; some I feel bereft if I go too long without communing with them; some I can pick up with where we left off even if we don’t see each other for years. All that said: **if you, reader, knew whether I’m fucking a given person, that would be absolutely in no way a predictor of which of any of the above statements might be true of my feelings about that individual.** This includes my former romantic partners, all of whom I was friends with before and during our romantic relationships, and several of whom I am friends with still.

Similarly: within the set {friends I fuck or have fucked}, there are some with whom fucking is the meat of our relationship, and others where it’s a delightful soupçon of an addition to the real relationship-meat which dwells elsewhere, and some where the reality lies between those two poles. Within the set {friends I don’t fuck or haven’t fucked}, in some cases I’d be 100% down but they’re not; in other cases they’d be 100% down but I’m not; in some cases the subject hasn’t come up; in some cases neither of us are interested; in some cases they’re like my sisters and that’s gross; in some cases what we have already is so precious to me that I’m afraid of messing it up; in some cases we used to fuck but don’t any longer—and none of these categories, either, are an indication of how central they are to me or how intense our relationship is or isn’t.

I don’t mean to give the impression that sex is always a casual thing that has no emotional resonance for me. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t; at least once in my life it’s had too much emotional weight, and crushed the romantic-relationship-trellis on which it grew. The point I’m trying to make is not that sex is intrinsically unimportant but quite the opposite—that friendships can be robust enough, substantive enough, to support the weight of sex that’s intense and connective. And other friendships can bring all of that intensity and connectivity and involve no sex at all; and others can have that level of intensity and connectivity and involve sex but the sex isn’t the most intense or connective part. And romantic relationships can also be much more intense and connective or much more casual and relaxed; neither category—romance or friendship—is inherently more central to a given individual’s cravings of the heart. Relationships are so diverse and alchemical, and change from day to day and from year to year as the participants in them grow and change, both within themselves and in relation to one another; that’s true of all relationships, of all kinds. Have I self-destructively mourned the marriages of intense platonic friends? Hell yes I have, Jesus Christ. In the words of Sterling Archer, have you not? 

The place where all this intersects with media consumption and fannishness is a tricky one, though, because there’s a sense—at least, I have a sense—that when I say I want “queer representation,” I mean I want representation that exists on the media piece’s own terms. And a lot of the time, frankly, those terms are just not very interesting or sophisticated! \o/ If you’re watching a rom-com or a drama where kissing is a shorthand for “getting together” romantically and sex is a single-purpose sealant of romantic intention and romantic love is affirmed “successful” with a wedding scene, then an intense innuendo-strewn friendship between same-sex folks that doesn’t consummate in fucking or even a kiss doesn’t equal representation on the piece’s own terms—even if I personally am pretty super critical of this concept of “consummation” in the first place and also pretty dubious about the idea that kissing equals getting together and that sex equals love, and even if I am also WAY more interested in consuming media about sexually fraught, innuendo-strewn same-sex friendships than I am in watching basically any rom-com ever. Which leaves people like me to steer our rocky way between the Scylla of pouring our energy into demanding explicitly queer iterations of a genre which we don’t enjoy and which reinforces exactly the same hierarchical bright-line friends-versus-sex/romance-partners construction preached by every straight rom-com; and the Charybdis of trying to convince ourselves that longing looks and lingering touches of fingers to napes constitutes representation. 

Obviously, both choices are shitty. 

What’re you gonna do! \o/ 

The other thing about representation on the piece’s own terms is that—well. There’s a sizeable niche minority of fanfic that works really hard to depict and in many cases valorize non-normative relationship models—say, triads with asymmetrical interpersonal investment, or primary/romantic relationships that aren’t sexual, or sexual relationships that aren’t romantic, or friends with benefits relationships—and I have a lot of sympathy for that project. Hell, my stuff would probably fall into that category except that all my characters are far too fucked up and morally grey to really valorize anything (nor is doing so a goal I’m particularly interested in). But the fact that one can use one’s computing machine to transform a canonical love triangle into a fraught threesome, or a canonical codependent friendship into a codependent love affair—or even, if one is trying to suck up to me personally, a canonical codependent friendship or enemyship into a shifting and hard-to-define sexually-charged queer whatsit that shows no signs of resolving into a more normative model—that’s not the same as representation at the source. Even if it’s possible to write the exact same events and interpret them in a complex and non-normative way, to me it only counts as source representation if one can muster a relatively high level of confidence that one’s interpretation is at least somewhat countenanced by the writer/director/content creator. (I have read and written some wacky lit-crit too; but that doesn’t mean that I actually believe Charles Dickens intended Great Expectations as an extended commentary on the dangers of denying the female orgasm.) And in the case of liminal, hard-to-define, possibly-queer relationships between characters in mainstream TV and film, I am almost always unable to muster that level of confidence. My opinion of the courage, independence and narrative integrity of the content creators is, as a general rule, simply not that high. 

Most of the time, on the contrary, my gut sense about a piece of media is that the comfort zone of its creators dwells almost exclusively in ticking pre-made label boxes. If a relationship is a “romance” then that means certain things and carries certain weight. If it’s a “friendship” then that means other things, and carries less weight. And because mainstream media privileges romance almost uniformly over friendship, and because it so often uses the “they’re just friends” excuse to downplay same-sex intimacy, and because there is such a dearth of explicitly queer representation in general and even less where nobody dies or goes mad, it makes a TON of sense to me that there would be this craving within the queer community for explicit, unapologetic, no-two-ways-about-it depictions of queer sexual-romantic relationships. I want that too! **What I _don’t_ want is yet more media or discourse around media—queer or straight—that reinforces this idea of the bright-line conversion narrative between an inferior friendship state and a fundamentally distinct and/or inherently superior romance state. And what I would love, what I personally crave, are more depictions of explicitly queer relationships that fall outside or vacillate uneasily between standard ticky-boxes—as do so many of the real queer relationships I have experienced or witnessed.** Personally I think it’s a wonderful thing about life as a queer woman, that in our relationships, more perhaps than in those of straight folks by virtue of us starting from an improvised and marginalized position, the boundaries and hierarchical value judgments associated with “friend,” “lover,” and “life partner” can be continually redrawn or even fuzzed out entirely. I wouldn’t want that quality to get lost in our otherwise-commendable push to make visible the more traditional side of queer romance.

As a final note: in its own way—distinct from but not totally unrelated to the way of mainstream media—Tumblr loves labels too. And I get it, I do: if you’ve gone through life feeling weird and broken and then come upon a word that describes the thing you thought was a moral or personal failing, a word moreover with which other people also identify, that is a tremendously powerful experience. Similarly, if you’re building a political movement, the language on the banners under which you gather is crucial to get right. (I say this as someone who has sat through more than my fair share of visioning and wordsmithing retreats at various lefty nonprofit jobs: it is infuriating, but it is important). The drawback, though, of becoming too fixated on labels, is that it can erase or limit one’s ability to perceive those liminal but incredibly meaningful and important states between one thing and another, or apart from either pole of a traditional dichotomy. 

John Keats defined negative capability, which as a quintessential capital-R Romantic he associated with greatness of thought, as the ability to, for the sake of artistic truth and beauty, “be in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” As applied to relationships I think of negative capability as the ability to be in the moment, experiencing it as it’s becoming, without necessarily needing to categorize what the end-point of that becoming might be. Labels have their power, yes; but there is a value in this, too—not least, that by resisting the compulsion to name a given relationship definitively, especially early on, we might make room for the most perfect realization of the dynamic between or among two or more people. In the rush to gather evidence in service of categorizing a given relationship—is it sexual or nonsexual? romantic or platonic? requited or unrequited? permanent or temporary? primary or secondary?—it’s possible, I think, to miss a lot of the nuance, of the in-betweenness, of the specificity and truth (and therefore, Keats would say, beauty) of the tangible and ever-shifting dynamics between people—dynamics which sometimes can’t be logically explained nor intellectually taxonomized but which can occasionally, through the alchemy of narrative, be communicated nonetheless. 

And that is what I’d most love to see depicted and celebrated in art.


	2. Addendum re: straight people

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Addendum to my original post (Chapter 1), clarifying why it was written through a queer lens when the fetishization of romance hurts straight people, too.

Thoughts on a few of the responses to this post:

Yes, I totally agree that straight folks are also poorly served by the fetishization of romance at the expense of friendship and, even more so, by the simplification of narrative boundaries between the two. Absolutely. It’s bad news for everyone. 

**However, there are two very deliberate reasons why, especially in a fandom context, I chose to talk about that issue through a specifically queer lens.**

THING THE FIRST:

At least on AO3, [M/M fic represents the largest shipping category by a huge margin](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/52261319793/next-up-in-my-ongoing-series-on-ao3-stats-a): 42.6% of all archived fic at last count, which accounts for a larger percentage than the Gen, F/M, and F/F categories put together. Not only that, but within fandom circles, M/M (and to a lesser extent just because there’s so much less of it, F/F) shipping is often talked about as a reaction to the very real dearth of queer representation in source media. When things then, as they inevitably do from time to time in all groups of humans, get nasty in fandoms with predominant M/M ships, the “discourse” tends to descend into this horrible, unnecessarily adversarial rabbit hole wherein (some) people who want Dude X and Dude Y to clearly and undeniably get together romantically accuse people who want something else for those characters of being homophobic and trying to deny them queer representation. (Spoiler: this is often not actually a sound conclusion to draw from the evidence.) Meanwhile, (some) people who enjoy Dude X and Dude Y as asexual life partners or intense friends or liminal whatsits argue that since they are able interpret the source material to reflect their own complicated queer experience, it therefore already is providing queer representation as it stands. (IMO this is often not exactly true either, because of my representation-on-the-source’s-own-terms-even-if-those-terms-are-shitty criterion.)

This is intensely frustrating for everyone, because both the push for explicitly queer characters and the desire for more narrative nuance in fictional relationships are totally valid and understandable! And they are not even (theoretically) in conflict with one another! But because there’s so little explicitly queer representation, and because the mainstream sometimes suffers from queer-blindness (”HAROLD, THEY’RE LESBIANS”), backing down even a little bit from the push for smack-them-over-the-head-with-something-they-can-understand sexual-romantic normativity can be a tough sell. 

By contrast, media involving straight folks removes half of the catch-22 in this situation right off the bat. Yes, straight media, like all media, could stand to be more nuanced and relationship-diverse, and less fixated on pairing off everyone romantically and ending every comedy with a wedding. But a movie about a liminal, intense but largely nonsexual, hard-to-define relationship between a straight man and a straight woman is never going to be perceived as taking away “straight representation.” That would be absurd. Straight folks are represented by 95% of the Western artistic canon. It may still be an uphill battle, but the lack of movement-internal tension does leave more freedom to experiment. 

**THING THE SECOND:**

IMO there’s a realism in representation issue at play. 

While it’s true that 

(a) straight people too are served poorly by the overwhelming narrative default setting of monogamous sex + romance (+ kids, usually) being fundamentally distinct from, and more important than, friendship; and that 

(b) there obviously are real-life straight people who are living their lives in ways that challenge that norm; and that 

(c) there are, just as obviously, many queer people living in nuclear monogamous families that privilege the romantic-sexual partners and sideline everyone else;

while all that is, as I say, true enough, in my experience the percentage of queer folks conducting and prioritizing their relationships in ways that diverge from that norm, is orders of magnitude higher than the percentage of straight folks who are doing the same. This is not because queer people are inherently more interesting or virtuous. It’s because we’re starting from a position that involves a unique history and unique obstacles, so we’re forced to find creative solutions.

The percentage of queer folks I know who have, for example, collaborated with another queer couple to have kids (sometimes because they were de facto barred from adoption and/or in vitro treatments) and are raising the kids as a three- or four-person unit; or who are legally married to and/or cohabiting with their close-friends-cum-life-partners while both parties pursue (or don’t pursue) sex and/or romance elsewhere and/or at home (sometimes because they’re not interested in sex and/or romance, sometimes because they don’t relate to it as an organizing principle); or who are intentionally living and fucking collectively (sometimes because this found family has replaced the family of origin that rejected them); or who are part of a big clique of divorced lesbians who married men in their youth because they wanted to have kids and who now collaborate with one another to raise said kids; or who, even if they are traditionally married, had to consciously work through whether or not they wanted to be monogamous—when I think of the percentage of queer folks for whom some or all of that is true, it’s FAR higher than the admittedly nonzero percentage of straight people I know to whom any of it applies. The vast majority of my straight friends and family are traditionally and (usually) monogamously married to their sexual/romantic partner, who is also the person with whom they spend the vast majority of their time when they’re not at work; and, if they have kids, are raising their biological offspring in a nuclear-family unit. 

And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that model! What’s more, as I’m well aware—having myself spent almost thirteen years in a monogamous male/female romantic relationship—there is generally far more complexity to straight or straight-looking marriage than meets the eye, and we should absolutely be working to represent that more faithfully in media (though I’d maintain that faithful representations of this type of nuance is far easier to find, at least in genres like Oscar-bait dramas and literary novels). **However, in portraying 95% of relationships among straight characters as adhering to the nuclear-family model, there’s less erasure of an actual, extant subcultural reality than if 95% of relationships among queer characters are given the same treatment.**

When I see the push for “queer romance” to look like a same-sex copy of “straight romance,” I’m concerned not just because “straight romance” is often unpalatably reductive and perfunctory as hell—which, again, is a real problem for all of us, straight folks very much included—but because there is an actual, radically different and fairly common current reality of queer existence that is getting erased and devalued if mainstream hetero-typical models are held up as the one true gold standard. As [Michael Warner has it](http://havingbeenbreathedout.tumblr.com/post/140951871618/hotgaydumbledore-reblogged-your-post-and-added), “Because gay social life is not as ritualised and institutionalised as straight life, each relation is an adventure in nearly uncharted territory.” Would I love to see straight folks move into a more unmapped territory of their own, as well? Certainly. But watching queer characters mapped wholesale onto the standard straight script feels vaguely less than convincing—less than recognizable—to me, as a dyke. 

I should add: plainly there’s a lot of fiction for which high realism is just not a goal. And that’s fine! I’m not out to tell people not to write domestic wedding stories and one-true-soulmate and kidfic if that’s what you want to write; obviously plenty of folks love it, both queer and straight! You do fandom they way you want, friends. My point is merely that whereas straight readers, as a general group and with exceptions, may more often be approaching this larger question from the position of having the exciting but optional opportunity to re-imagine and transform the assumptions that are still very much taken for granted in the majority of their relationships; queer readers, again as a general group and with exceptions, may more often be coming from the perspective of wanting to see their current lived realities accurately represented. 

I think it’s fair, therefore, to frame queerness as relevant to the issue.


End file.
